My smart phone refused to charge last night, and I was in London, taking the chance to visit an old friend for a delicious Thanksgiving dinner before attending a work event. I left my AirBnB this morning with a slight sense of panic and a scrap of paper in my pocket, covered with maps of my route to the Underground hastily scribbled in pencil.
This explains my late Substack. And the lack of pictures of my walk from Aldgate to Liverpool Street, where city churches crammed themselves in alongside kebab shops and urban sculptures, all shining against a bright blue sky.
Reverting to analogue navigation and being out of contact for the day was a delight, of course. Once I realised it’s hard to get lost when every destination is within 2 minutes of a Tube station, I relaxed into the unexpected freedom. I forced myself to pause outside Spitalfields Market, looking and looking, even if I couldn’t capture an image to share. And when I did, in fact, get lost, I told myself I had plenty of time and was simply keen to explore the street in more detail, going in one direction and then the other. Being disoriented in daylight, in the centre of a vibrant and sun-drenched city, is an adventure.
My phone was already failing yesterday evening, and as I left the supermarket where I had picked up dessert to walk to my friend’s house in a part of London I am not familiar with, I was already late. I tried to memorise the pattern of streets showing on the screen, knowing that Google Maps would drain the battery faster than anything. The GPS took me to an underpass sporadically lit by streetlamps and a winding pathway running alongside a raised dual carriageway on one side and fenced off baseball courts and school yards on the other. Somebody’s walk home, just not mine.
I’ve been experiencing another kind of disorientation recently, having had some issues with a blocked ear and its subsequent treatment. No need for details, but for a while, I was not sure if my hearing would fully return. Partial deafness has made me listen more carefully, noticing bass noises like the grinding thud of the nearby landfill site and hum of traffic as a backdrop to shriller notes of birdsong on my usual walk round the local fields. But it also changes my spatial awareness and cocoons me with its hisses. In the heavy fog that descended this week, I felt like I was walking into nothingness, a place where sight and sound were no longer there to help me find my way.
No harm: but all this a reminder that I take so much for granted as I orient myself in new places and old.
Your voice is so direct and personal, I felt for you, lost and also anxious about that ‘cocoon’, your partial deafness, reminded me exactly how I had felt when I had a temporary problem with hearing. It is the season of mists. Thank you again.
Thanks for this evocative piece, Alison. Getting lost is sort of freedom in itself, and on my recent pilgrimage I did not slavishly follow maps or digital data. It added an extra dimension to the experience. And our paths as writers can benefit from similar disorentation, don't you think?